Archiving Your Children's Homework with Metadata

Illustration: Art Explosion

For the past few years I have struggled to come up with efficient ways to digitally archive my children's homework. It's hard to stay on top of all the worksheets and journal entries. However, I think I've figured out a good method using metadata.

For those of you who follow my work, you may have noticed that I'm doing more and more talks about metadata. Specifically, I did my latest workshop online for the Southern California Genealogical Society (SCGS membership required). I have an older—and less informational version—from last year on the Photo Grafix YouTube channel (video below the article).

I select all of the scans of their homework and apply top-level keywords, such as:

Name of child (first name)

Education
  Grade level
    General subject (example: Science)
      Specific subject (example: Geology)

Year
   Month
     Page number (if applicable)

Using Adobe Photoshop Bridge and the Keywords metadata field, I just plug these into the Keywords panel and they all show up as I type. It's really quite convenient